information points report · 20th esco maintenance committee– information points report march...

Information points report

Employment, Social Affairs & Inclusion 20th ESCO Maintenance Committee– Information points report

March 2016 2

ESCO (2016) SEC FINAL

Document Date: 20/06/2016

Last update: 04/07/2016

Table of Contents

Table of Contents .............................................................................................. 2 Purpose of this document ................................................................................... 3 EURES decision on the use of NACE rev2 on the EURES-platform ............................. 4

Background information ................................................................................... 4 EURES decision and next steps ......................................................................... 4

Second meeting of the Member States Working Group on ESCO (MSWG) ................. 5 Background information ................................................................................... 5 Current status ................................................................................................ 5 Next steps ..................................................................................................... 6

Note on the ESCO consultation by the Member States working group on ESCO .......... 7 Purpose of this note ........................................................................................ 7 Context ......................................................................................................... 7 Next steps ..................................................................................................... 7

Briefing on the results of the skills clean-up .......................................................... 9 Briefing on the status of the ESCO translation work ..............................................10 Request for information on specific ESCO occupations ...........................................11

Background ...................................................................................................11 Is there a need for a generic occupation of project manager ...............................11 Welding occupations in ESCO v1 ......................................................................11 The need to include the associate professional nurse in ESCO .............................12 Do OCCs such as pharmacologist, toxicologist or chemist could be subsets of

biologist? ......................................................................................................12 Differences between chemist and biologist ........................................................13 Should herbalist appear as a separate occupation?.............................................14 The completeness of the list of OCCs related to airport construction .....................14 The completeness of the list of OCCs related to teacher's trainers ........................14 The completeness of the metal industry in ESCO v1 ...........................................14 Why OCCs such as magician and singer were rejected whereas choreographer was

accepted .......................................................................................................15 Qualifications pilot ............................................................................................16


March 2016 3

Purpose of this document The purpose of this document is to inform the ESCO Maintenance Committee (MAI) on

Commission action following their advice on ESCO and on recent developments on the

ESCO project.

The ESCO Secretariat (SEC) will not provide formal presentations on the topics

covered in this document. The SEC kindly invites the MAI members to submit

questions via e-mail before the meeting. The SEC will collect the questions and report

on them in the meeting.


March 2016 4

EURES decision on the use of NACE rev2 on the EURES-platform Relevant for Day 1

Background information

In the 18th and 19th ESCO Maintenance Committee (MAI) meetings, the ESCO

Secretariat (SEC) asked the MAI members’ advice on mapping the ESCO occupations

to the NACE rev2 (from here onwards ‘NACE’) sectors of economic activity.

However, the MAI members expressed the following concerns:

- NACE is a statistical classification and was not developed for job matching;

- Many occupations cut across several economic sectors, making the search

results too broad;

- Filtering jobs by economic sectors could hide job vacancies and hinder job

mobility.

EURES decision and next steps

Following the advice of the MAI, the ESCO team re-discussed the use of the NACE

classification with the EURES team. EURES stated that a mapping to NACE is a clear

business requirement from their side. The EURES Job Mobility Portal intends to use

NACE to provide users with an additional way to search for occupations. Many workers

and jobseekers build their career on sectoral expertise, and using NACE in search and

matching would allow them to filter the job vacancies for sectors or areas of economic

activity. In fact, previous users’ feedback suggests the added value of providing this

additional filtering mechanism that will be controlled by the users themselves.

We are therefore currently working on a methodology to develop a mapping between

ESCO and NACE. To this end, we will take contact with Member States that already

have experience with creating a mapping between occupational and skills

classifications in order to learn from their experience, e.g.:

Slovakia (SK NACE)

Spain (Clasificación Nacional de Actividades Económicas)

Italy (ATECO)

France (ROME v3 – NAF)

The SEC will present this methodology at the next MAI meeting and will ask for the

members’ advice.


March 2016 5

Second meeting of the Member States Working Group on ESCO (MSWG) Relevant for Day 1 and Day 2

Background information

The Member States working group on ESCO (MSWG) is composed by representatives

of Member States' authorities on labour market and education and training plus

European social partners. Its aim is to support the Commission on the development

and implementation of ESCO at national level, including in its links with the recent

updated EURES Regulation. The ESCO Secretariat (SEC) has been regularly informing

the ESCO Maintenance Committee (MAI) on MSWG's activities and meetings.

Current status

The second meeting of the MSWG took place in Brussels on 26 April 2016.

Representatives of 24 Member States (MS) (all EU MS except EL, BG, IE and NL)

attended the meeting. Some MS were represented by their permanent representatives

in Brussels instead of the official nominated representatives, due mainly to travel

restrictions linked to the Brussels terrorist attacks at the time of the meeting. The

meeting was held in a constructive and positive atmosphere.

The three main goals of this second MSWG meeting were: a) to inform MS about the

New Skills Agenda for Europe and the role of ESCO in it; b) to provide an overview of

the latest developments of the ESCO project, namely process and calendar, country

visits, translations, the pilot projects and the communication strategy and c) to invite

the MSWG to give general feedback on ESCO version 1 (v1) and its translation into the

24 EU official languages.

Main outcomes of the meeting were:

More information was required by several members of the group on the

new governance scheme currently being proposed by the Commission for

the future management of all European tools related to skills and qualifications.

The request for information focused on the role and place of the MSWG in a

future Coordination group for skills and qualifications, as well as with other

existing groups such as the ACVT, the possible legal basis for the new Group,

and how to involve stakeholders and social partners in the development of the

new group.

The group reacted positively to the Commission's suggestion for the

members of the group to review the general features of the ESCO classification

and its linguistic accuracy. Some members of the group would like to associate

the national EURES units/PES to this consultation. More details on the

consultation were asked, in particular its calendar, methodology and how the

input of the group would be integrated in ESCO's development. The provisional

calendar presented by the Commission for this consultation by the MSWG was


March 2016 6

end of July for general feedback on the English version of ESCO v1 and

November/December for the translated versions of v1.

The group expressed some concerns about the timing being proposed by

the Commission for the translation of the ESCO content into 23 official

languages and its compatibility with the expected time frame for the

publication of ESCO version 1 (expected end 2016). DG Translation will conduct

the translation work. The group reacted positively to the Commission

suggestion on involving national experts on classifications to support DG

Translation on acute technical points of this translation work.

The group approved the ESCO's Communication strategy presented by

the Commission at the meeting. However the group would like that this general

strategy is complemented by concrete communication activities in a near

future.

Next steps

The next meeting of the group is planned for 26 September 2016 (tbc). The main

point of the agenda will be ESCO's consultation process by the MSWG.


March 2016 7

Note on the ESCO consultation by the Member States working group on ESCO Relevant for Day 1 and Day 2

Purpose of this note

The purpose of this note is to inform the ESCO Board (BOA) and the ESCO

Maintenance Committee (MAI) on the consultation on ESCO v1 that the Commission is

undertaking with the Member States through the Member States Working Group on

ESCO (MSWG) during Q3 & Q4 2016. In the documents package for this meeting, the

members of the Board and the MAI will find the Commission's document "Point 2 b):

Review of ESCO by the MSWG". This document was distributed to the MSWG for

discussion on their meeting of 26 April 20161 and it explains the aims of and

procedure for the aforementioned consultation.

Context

The mission of the MSWG is to advise and support the Commission on the

implementation and development of ESCO and to ensure its interoperability with the

national classification systems on employment. A timely knowledge and evaluation of

v1 by the MSWG members will help to anticipate any potential ESCO implementation

issues and enable a smooth use of ESCO in the future.

The goal of this consultation is not to review ESCO's content (other quality assurance

mechanism are in place for this) but to give the Commission informal and general

feedback from the Member States on the ESCO classification as a whole, its

terminological richness, how it compares to other similar international classifications

such as ISCO 08 and in particular on its adequacy to map to national classifications.

The consultation should notably contribute to support the Implementing Acts

according to art. 19 (2) of Regulation 2016/589/EU (EURES Regulation), aiming at

backing up the periodical mapping of national classifications to ESCO.

Members of the MSWG can be supported on their assessment by any other colleagues

and/or stakeholders (PES, experts etc.) they deem important to involve in it.

Next steps

The consultation will be done on line2 and will be divided in two phases:

1-First phase: Consultation on the general overview of ESCO content.

The MSWG will have the opportunity to review the English version of ESCO v1 from 29

June to 1 September 2016. The consultation focus exclusively on ESCO's occupation

and knowledge, skills and competence pillars. Due to its different development

process the qualifications pillar will not be included in this process.

2- Second phase: Consultation on the different language versions of ESCO

In the last quarter of 2016, the Commission expects to have ready the final version of

ESCO's occupations and skills/competences pillars in all official EU languages. This

1 The minutes of the MSWG meeting on 26 April 2016 were sent to the Board and the

MAI on 27 June last. 2 The consultation will be done by using the link http://prerelease.escoportal.eu.


March 2016 8

second phase of the consultation will focus only on ESCO's linguistic accuracy.

MSWG's members would have a four weeks period to asses this content.

MSWG's members can send their feedback and comments by written format for both

consultation phases to the ESCO Secretariat. The Commission will evaluate these

comments and feedback and implement pertinent improvements in the final stages of

the ESCO development.


March 2016 9

Briefing on the results of the skills clean-up Relevant for Day 1

As part of the quality assurance of the ESCO occupation profiles, the Taxonomy Expert

Group (TEG) carried out a four step clean-up process of the knowledge, skills and

competences (from now on mentioned as “skills”).

The ESCO Secretariat (SEC) discussed this process with the ESCO Maintenance

Committee (MAI) during the 16th and 18th meetings. The process is summarised below

before providing the main results:

1. Split of skills

The TEG identified skill concepts which consisted of more than one action verb and

divided the concept in two to ensure one action verb per concept (e.g. the skill

‘prepare and serve drinks’ would be split into ‘prepare drinks’ and ‘serve drinks’)

2. Contextualisation

Originally the Secretariat and the TEG linked transversal skills (e.g. “work in teams”)

directly to the occupation profiles.

However, the ESCO Maintenance Committee advised the Secretariat that this would

not be useful. Due to the generic character of the transversal skills, which makes them

applicable to almost every occupation, this would create fuzziness in the job matching

results.

As a consequence, the Secretariat decided to describe the transversal skills in the

context of specific occupations. In practice, every time that the Secretariat and TEG

needed to link an occupation to a transversal skill, they created a new skill on the

basis of the question: how does the transversal skill translate in the context of this

occupation? For example, how does the transversal skill “report facts” apply to an

“explosives engineer”? In this case the Secretariat and the TEG created the new skill

“report outcome of blast”.

3. Creation of relations among skills

The TEG identified several skills as being duplicates, synonyms, or closely related. In

order to record these cases and make them transparent, they created relations

between these skills and qualified them as “same as”, “similar” or “broader/narrower”.

This supported the following step (merging of skills) and will further support the

creation of skills collections.

4. Merge of skills

The TEG identified the skills that they considered to be equal in scope with the “same

as” relation. The following step was then to merge these skills.

The clean-up process resulted in the following outcomes:

Process Amount of skills

Split skills 493

Contextualised skills 2732

Merged skills 431


March 2016 10

Briefing on the status of the ESCO translation work Relevant for Day 1

During the 19th ESCO Maintenance Committee (MAI) meeting, the MAI members

discussed the ESCO translation process and provided the following advice to the

Commission:

- The Commission should ensure that translations are quality assessed before

the release;

- The Commission could consider validation of the translations by the respective

public employment services as a "plan B";

- The Commission should launch the translation after the gap analysis so that

national occupation classifications can facilitate the translation process;

- The Commission should review the timing given the high complexity of the

translations task.

Following this discussion, we re-discussed the translation process with DG Translation,

the Commission's service for translation. Together, we also reviewed the experience

with the translation pilot project. To support DG Translation in the upcoming

translation project, we took the following measures which are taking into account the

advice of the MAI:

- The Commission invited Member States through the Member States Working

Group (MSWG) to provide contact information for national experts as well as

their national occupational classification in order to facilitate the translation

process by DG Translation. So far, 17 countries (including non-Member States)

provided us with contacts and 6 with their national occupational classification.

- Through the MSWG the Commission will also consult Member States on the

results of the translations. This will allow covering all official languages and it

will allow each Member State to involve the appropriate entity of their national

administration (e.g. the public employment service).

- The Commission will not launch the translation work before finalisation of the

gap analysis.

- The Commission reviewed the timeline in light of these additional quality

assessment steps and will allow an additional two months to finalise the

translation work.


March 2016 11

Request for information on specific ESCO occupations Relevant for Day 1

Background

This section aims at replying to specific questions that the ESCO Maintenance

Committee (MAI) members raised during the 19th MAI meeting on some occupations.

Is there a need for a generic occupation of project manager

There are two reasons why ‘project manager’ features in ESCO as a generic

occupation:

The first reason is that project manager is an occupation that ranges across all

industries and the only thing that varies is the context of the job (e.g. project

manager in construction projects, IT projects). Nevertheless, the basis of the

occupation remains the same. The differences across jobsappear in the optional

skills of the occupation.

The second reason is the primary hierarchy, which requires of occupations of a

general nature to create the hierarchy based on ISCO.

Welding occupations in ESCO v1

Following the request of Mr David Hunter during the 19th MAI meeting, the ESCO

Secretariat (SEC) investigated how to better reflect the field of welding for ESCO v1.

The SEC consulted the European Federation for Welding, Joining and Cutting (EWF)

and remodelled the field of welding in ESCO in line with the information sources EWF

provides on their website3.

The SEC reduced the total number of welding occupations from fifteen to seven. ESCO

v1 now contains 3 broader welding occupations: ‘welder’, ‘welding inspector’ and

‘welding coordinator’. Based on a labour market check, the SEC added the in ESCO

already existing specialised welders4, e.g. ‘spot welder’, as specialisations to the

‘welder’. Fig. 1: Welding occupations in ESCO v1

3 EWF website: http://www.ewf.be/qualification.aspx 4 Welders specialised in specific welding techniques.

http://www.ewf.be/qualification.aspx


March 2016 12

The SEC merged six welder specialisations referring to other context than welding

techniques, e.g. a sector or group of products, into the broader ‘welder’.

The need to include the associate professional nurse in ESCO

We researched about ‘health care assistant’ and ‘assistant nurse’. As a conclusion, it is

possible to state that, both work as part of nursing teams but their differences come

down to qualifications and studies. While the assistant nurse is a nurse, the healthcare

assistant is not.

Healthcare assistants assist the nurses and provide basic support to patients.

The sources bellow delineate their roles and differences. It also established that

in order to obtain the title, an assistant nurse studies for a longer period than

the healthcare assistant.

https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/explore-roles/clinical-support-

staff/healthcare-assistant

https://www.rcn.org.uk/professional-development/become-an-hca-ap

https://nationalcareersservice.direct.gov.uk/advice/planning/jobprofiles/Pages/

healthcareassistant.aspx

Nurse assistants provide nursing care. They are not full nurses but do provide

similar care to healthcare assistants, with a few extra roles it seems like.

Do OCCs such as pharmacologist, toxicologist or chemist could be subsets of biologist?

The sub sector life science research of SCIE contains the following OCCs:

https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/explore-roles/clinical-support-staff/healthcare-assistant

https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/explore-roles/clinical-support-staff/healthcare-assistant

https://www.rcn.org.uk/professional-development/become-an-hca-ap

https://nationalcareersservice.direct.gov.uk/advice/planning/jobprofiles/Pages/healthcareassistant.aspx

https://nationalcareersservice.direct.gov.uk/advice/planning/jobprofiles/Pages/healthcareassistant.aspx


March 2016 13

Toxicologist

Physiologist

Pharmacologist

Microbiologist

Kinesiologist

Immunologist

Geneticist

Epidemiologist

Biochemist

Biometrician

Biologist

All these OCCs share the same ISCO-08 code, which is: 2131 – Biologist, botanists,

zoologists and related professionals. These OCCs have been developed as stand-alone

OCCs for the following reason: there is a distinction between the biology field and the

biologist OCC. The former is the scientific field to which the OCCs in question belong,

while they also belong to other fields because they overlap. The latter term, the

biologist OCC, is one of those OCCs that belong to the biology field, but it does not

mean that a biologist encompasses all fields of biology nor that other OCCs should be

considered as narrower nor equivalent to the biologist. OCCs, such as toxicologist and

biochemist are multidisciplinary, i.e. they belong not only to a branch of biology but

also to other scientific branches, such as chemistry and medicine. As a result, they are

specialised which makes these OCCs be stand-alone.

Pharmacologist and biochemist are listed as OCC examples in ISCO under 2131 as well

as in several of the NOCs the SEC used for the gap analysis.

Differences between chemist and biologist

They are two distinct OCCs, which is justified by the descriptions of each OCC and the

different ISCO unit group to which they belong:

Chemist (ISCO 2113 Chemists): Chemists perform laboratory research by testing

and analysing the chemical structure of substances. They translate the research

results into industrial production processes which are further used in the development

or improvement of products. Chemists are also testing the quality of the manufactured

products and their environmental impact.

Biologist (ISCO 2131 Biologists, Botanists, Zoologists and Related

Professionals): Biologists study living organisms and life in its large extent in

combination with their environment. They strive, by means of their research, to

explain the functioning mechanisms employed by organisms, their interactions, and

their evolution.

Scope note: Includes people performing medical research, biotechnology,

biochemistry, pharmaceutical research.

Biochemist (OCC example under ISCO 2131 Biologists, Botanists, Zoologists

and Related Professionals): Biochemists study and perform research on the

reactions caused by chemicals in living organisms. This includes performing research

for the development or improvement of chemical-based products (e.g. medicine)

aiming to improve the health of living organisms, as well as, to better understand their

reactions.

This is a multidisciplinary OCC, i.e. it belongs not only to a branch of biology but also

to another scientific branch (chemistry). As a result, it is specialised which makes this

OCCs be stand-alone.


March 2016 14

Should herbalist appear as a separate occupation?

We created the herbal therapist prior to OCP when trying to identify the most relevant

complementary medicine OCCs. As it is possible to find herbalist vacancies, this OCC

was kept.

The completeness of the list of OCCs related to airport construction

The following points refer to OCCs related to airport construction:

The general managing of the airport construction is done by a ‘construction

general contractor’, called in ESCO ‘construction manager’ (this OCC was added

after the gap analysis).

The work related to the laying or putting runways, is mostly done by ‘road

roller operators’, which can be found in CONS.

For further information about the airport OCCs, it is possible to refer to the TRANS

sector which has such OCC under the OCCs group of ‘air transport’.

The completeness of the list of OCCs related to teacher's trainers

After further research, the SEC decided not to include this OCC, proposed in the

context of the OCP, as trainers are often experienced teachers, so the OCC is already

represented in the classification. Moreover, the gap analysis confirmed the decision

not to include ‘teacher’s trainer’ as new OCC.

The completeness of the metal industry in ESCO v1

ESCO v1 covers both basic metal production as the manufacturing of various metal

products. The SEC validated the coverage of the metal sector in ESCO in 2 manners:

1. through the ESCO Online Consultation, and

2. by performing a thorough gap-analysis with eight National Occupational

Classifications.

The SEC involved approximately 150 experts during the ESCO Online Consultation to

review the content related to the manufacturing of various metal products5. Following

expert feedback during the ESCO Online Consultation, the SEC created 10 new

occupations in the metal industry.

During the gap analysis, the SEC compared the content of ESCO with eight National

Occupational Classifications. The SEC identified six gaps for the metal industry, thus

created six additional occupations.

Taking the expert input and the outcome of the gap analysis into account, the SEC is

assured that the metal industry is well covered in ESCO v1.

5 The field of basic metal production is covered by the Sectoral Reference Group

‘Mining and heavy industry’ and its content was already final early 2015.


March 2016 15

Why OCCs such as magician and singer were rejected whereas

choreographer was accepted

Magician is not a preferred-term, while singer is, as said, so is choreographer.

Historically, in late 2014, it was suggested to move magician to the subsector of

performance artists. In February 2015, further work was done by experts representing

circus schools. As a result, magician is now listed as a non-preferred term of variety

artist. ‘Street magician’ is a non-preferred term to the street performer. Elements

referring to magic tricks also appear in the description linked to stand-up comedian.

Singer constitutes a preferred-term and is a different occupation than musician. The

split occurred in November 2014 and was maintained after that date.


March 2016 16

Qualifications pilot Relevant for Day 1 and Day 2

The ESCO Secretariat (SEC) carried out, between November 2015 and March 2016, a

pilot project to test the qualifications metadata schema6. This pilot was supported by

the ISA7 programme and was done in cooperation with DG Informatics.

The main objectives of the pilot were to demonstrate:

The added value of publishing information about qualifications according to a

common language, the qualifications metadata schema included in the call for

proposals of 2015, to create or upgrade national qualifications databases and

link them to European portals;

That distributed information about qualifications can be aggregated if based on

a common schema;

How these aggregated metadata about qualifications can be further exploited.

How these metadata can be presented in a uniform way.

For the purposes of the pilot, the SEC received information on qualifications from three

different sources:

- Spain (Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports) and Sweden (National Agency

for Higher Vocational Education) to test the indirect inclusion to ESCO;

- Microsoft (learning department), to test the direct inclusion to ESCO.

The pilot tested two simple use cases: “search and view qualifications” (based on

label, EQF level, ISCED-F field and country) and “find related qualifications” (based on

the EQF level and/or the ISCED-F field).

The data was collected and published following the common qualifications schema in a

website where a user can search and view all the loaded qualifications in a

standardized way. The pilot website was presented to the participant stakeholders

(Sweden, Spain and Microsoft), as well as to the ESCO BOA and the ESCO MSWG. It

received positive feedback from them and its current version was updated based on

the received comments.

The Commission is currently considering doing a second phase of the qualifications

pilot project in order to cover additional topics, such as semi-automated extraction of

Learning Outcomes, use of ESCO skills as Learning Outcomes or decentralised

publication of information.

6 https://ec.europa.eu/esco/portal/escopedia/The_ESCO_Qualifications_Pillar

7 Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations

https://ec.europa.eu/esco/portal/escopedia/The_ESCO_Qualifications_Pillar

information points report · 20th esco maintenance committee– information points report march...

Documents